The present disclosure relates generally to telecommunications, and more particularly to crowd-sourcing mobile messaging spam detection and defense.
Mobile devices have become a ubiquitous means of communication. Cell phones are estimated to be at near 100% penetration in the United States, with approximately half of these devices being smart phones. Globally, 1.6 billion mobile phones and 66.9 million tablets were in use in 2011. This increase in the use of mobile devices leads to an increase of communication via Short Messaging Service (SMS) and Internet Protocol Messaging (IP-messaging). These increases also allow for more mobile messaging exploits and abuses. In 2011, SMS spam rose 45% to 4.5 billion messages. Approximately 69% of mobile users have received text spam (also referred to as unwanted messages) in 2012 according to some accounts. In addition, the proliferation of IP Based Text via Over-the-top messaging applications brings further growing vulnerability to mobile customers. In 2010, many social networking users unwittingly and unknowingly spread spam when clicking on the “LOL is this you” messages. In 2012, many microblog users became victims of direct message malware. The spam perpetrators often extract personal and financial information from victims. They may trick victims into unknowingly signing up for expensive services and/or downloading malware which converts their device into a spambot.
Among various existing SMS spam detection mechanisms, customer SMS reports (i.e., victims forwarding spam text received to a particular phone number designated by their carriers) are utilized by major cellular carriers as the major tool or as the major input to other defense methods to fight against SMS spam. However, the customer awareness is limited on how to report SMS spam, and even for those who know about it, and use it, the manual two-step text forward to a phone number is both tedious and error-prone. This results in an extremely low SMS report rate and hence a significant detection delay in all the algorithms which rely on customer SMS reports as an input.
Spam reporting in IP-based messaging applications varies from application to application if it is available. As such, the spam reporting mechanism predicates that users know how to report spam for each messaging application.